San Francisco's unemployment rate is 2.8%, an all-time low. The causes are various, but it's clearly due to the tech boom and astronomically high housing costs creating a massive labor shortage. This inquiry draws on participants' workplace situation -- borrowing from Silver's Forces of Labor -- to find ways to strengthen workers associational and structural power to leverage this condition for working class advantage.

About a third of Americans work either for the government or in the education and health services sectors, which include teachers, doctors, and nurses. Another quarter are in retail, leisure, and hospitality, which includes people working in stores, restaurants, movie theaters, and hotels. An additional 14% are employed in professional and business services, which include employees of law, architecture, and management firms.

In total, 2/3 of American jobs are in the local service sector, and that number has been quietly growing for the past 50 years. Most industrialized nations have a similar percentage of local service jobs. The goods and services in this sector are locally produced and locally consumed and therefore do not face global competition. Although jobs in local services constitute the vast majority of jobs, they are the effect, not the cause, of economic growth. One reason that productivity in local services tend not to change much over time is that it takes the same amount of labor to cut your hair, wait on a table, drive a bus, or teach math as it did 50 years ago.

Productivity in the tech sector increases steadily every year, due to technological changes in the larger society. Historically, wages grew with productivity growth. 50 years ago, manufacturing was the sector driving this growth, that allowed labor organizing to great raise the wages of all American workers, including local service workers. Today, the tech industry is the driver, determining the baseline wages of all American workers, whether they work in tech innovation or not.

The labor shortages in the booming tech industry bring high salaries to the communities where they cluster (another topic, but including "Silicon Forest" in Portland, OR, "Silicon Beach" and the tech/entertainment/media cluster around Santa Monica/Venice/Culver City, CA, biotech in San Diego, "Silicon Alley" in NYC, Research Triangle in North Carolina, Route 128 outside Boston, "Silicon Hills" in Austin, TX, etc., etc.) and their impact on the local economy is much deeper than their direct effect. Housing costs shoot up astronomically, making survival more difficult for the working class in all other sectors.

Attracting a scientist or a software engineer to a city triggers a multiplier effect, increasing employment and salaries for those who provide local services. For each new software designer hired at Twitter in San Francisco, there are 5 new job openings for baristas, personal trainers, doctors, and taxi drivers. The multiplier effect also drove the rise of app-based gig economy services provide by new tech exploiters of those working under the legal fiction of being "independent contractors," like Uber, Lyft, Task Rabbit, Doordash, Postmates, etc., etc.

Tech will never be responsible for the majority of jobs in the U.S., but it has had a disproportionate effect on the economy of American cities affected by the recent boom. Most sectors have a multiplier effect, but the tech sector has the largest multiplier of all: about 3 times larger than manufacturing.

Our workshop will use Beverly Silver's analysis of workers power to strategize a fightback and ways to leverage the current labor shortages -- especially marketplace bargaining power -- to push for a class struggle response to the tech boom in cities like San Francisco. But we need to rethink ways to take the class war on the offensive everywhere.

Workers' Inquiry: Class War Strategies Against Bay Area Boom, a Participatory Workshop

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About this blog

One of the forms in which the working class exists today is at the various nodal points along global supply chains. Our project uses a class analysis to articulate how changes in the sites and methods of production – à la Beverly Silver's Forces of Production – affect the class composition of the global proletariat, towards the end of building worker-to-worker networks that encourage working class self-activity that's cross-sectoral and internationalist.

HISTORY OF THE PROJECT

The project's precursor was an informal group formed in San Francisco, California in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001. It continued to meet for several years, with some later going on to create other ultra-left/left communist groups. The original purpose was to research changes in the world political economy; one subgroup studied Islamism and the changes in geopolitical inter-capitalist tensions; the other subgroup researched and attempted to intervene in class struggle. In October 2012 we regrouped as the Global Supply Chains class when we helped co-found the Bay Area Public School.

SCOPE OF THE PROJECT

Capitalism relies on an integrated infrastructure of production clusters and transportation networks, comprised of ports, warehouses, rail lines, highways, information grids and investment vehicles in order to produce and circulate goods. The physical nodes are arrayed in clusters of factories, warehouses, logistics services, and retail, all tied together by maritime, rail, trucking, and telecom networks. This global “factory without walls” allows capitalists to scour the planet for the cheapest and most compliant labor, externalizing costs of its maintenance onto the working class -- or the environment. These networks generate flows of commodities and information with ever-increasing speed, as the system strives for just-in-time production and inventory-less distribution for a unified global market. Our project demonstrates how these nodes, clusters, networks, corridors and flows are interconnected within an integrated system of production, distribution and consumption.

Supply chains are vulnerable and our goal is to identify where working class solidarity has the greatest possibility to spread up and down the chain, across sectors, borders – and even oceans. In providing useful and accessible real time information about conflicts along global supply chains, we aim to facilitate class-based collective action that forges connections and solidarity among related struggles. Our ultimate vision is a world beyond capitalist production and supply chains.

SUPPLY CHAIN INQUIRIES

One of our public activities has been conducting these "thought experiments," where workers model strikes that extended across sectors, go beyond geographical limitations, and across international borders. In our experience, the ideal outcome is further questions, rather than facile answers. Find examples of these inquiries by searching through our blog here on libcom.

CONTACT US

Global Supply Chains Research's study group continues to meet every other week (in San Francisco) and maintains an e-mail list of contacts throughout the world. If you support internationalist class struggle and are interested in joining the project, please contact us.

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